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Breathless

Poor Hubbin. He sent me to bed early last night because I have a busy day. He woke me up at 12:30am out of sheer frustration, as in near tears, because he just flat out can’t breathe. He went to see the allergist about two months ago and of course tested positive for every single thing they tested him for. (His only mild reaction was to dogs which is one of my worst. Henceforth there shall only reptillian or aquatic pets.) I feel so bad for him. He had to take today off work because he couldn’t breathe enough to fall asleep and if you can’t sleep it’s hard to be an enthusiastic highschool teacher. He is supposed to start getting allergy shots but had to wait for the dust around his health insurance to settle after the teachers negotiated a new contract this year. He takes Zyrtec daily, often takes Benedryl at night too, his allergist told him it was fine to take an expectorant regularly to keep from drowning and his allergist gave him an albuterol inhalor. I was convined he had undiagnosed asthma because it’s always the breathing that’s an issue but the allergist said he didn’t have asthma.

He’s going to try and get another appointment today with the allergist, and I told him to please just start getting the shots, at this point it doesn’t matter how much they’ll cost out of pocket, this is rediculous. The poor guy hasn’t slept in bed with me for more than a year and a half. He sleeps in the living room on the leather sofa that he can wipe down with disinfectant before sleeping with only a blanket he runs through the washer every other day. No pillow, that would be too many dust mites. I almost never confess to people that he sleeps in the living room every night because the reactions I get are just ghastly.

The problem is there’s just nothing left that we can do! We bought a house without carpeting, we don’t have cloth ANYTHING, he changes the airfilter on the furnace at least once a month, the air purifier is always running… I mean what’s left? Amputating his lungs? Something is just not right when you wake up at night with nightmares you have lung cancer!

I spoke with my mom, who’s already a nurse, not just a nurse in training like me and she agrees with me that he should get a TB test, and probably needs to be seeing a pulmonologist as well as an allergist because this is far above and beyond a runny nose.

No offense to anyone out there but I think allergists are kind of witch doctors anyway, at least that’s what my experience with them has led me to believe. I went to one a few times about 10 years ago for this recurrent rash I kept getting around my eyes and had a complete work up only to have the allergist’s official statement be “Well my hunch is you’re allergic to something, I just don’t know what”…. Really? That’s why I showed up at the fucking allergist in the first place!

Here’s hoping poor Hubbin can get in to see SOMEONE who can do SOMETHING today.

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3 thoughts on “Breathless”

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I think allergists are idiots. I took the shots for years and years with no help. My dad took them for 25 years and still sneezes his way through every day. Just like everyone else in my family I test positive for almost all allergies. I can get by on Allegra-D but Zyrtec, Claritin and others are like water. If I were you I would tell him to skip the shots, the allergist and go straight to the pulmonologist. They can give you allergy meds, too, and deal with the lung stuff. Good luck. I hope it’s not TB – that is not a fun course of treatment even if its just latent.

I worked in an allergy clinic for four years and sadly, most people only got minimal relief with injections. (The ones with food allergies had better results with shots than those with environmental allergies, in my experience. Who knows if it was the shots or placebo effect…) I guess it is worth a try, though, if you have done everything else to reduce his exposure to antigens.
And I agree with Ashley that the Pulmo doc is probably your best bet. Shots are expensive and very time consuming. (Our clinic wouldn’t let patients self administer until they reached their max dose of antigen and if your hubbin is particularly sensitive, that could take a longgg time.)
My heart breaks for both of you guys — I hope he gets relief in the very near future!